Monday, June 21, 2010

Nazi UFOs and Roswell

Oh, this is really fair. The book (Roswell and the Reich by Joseph P. Farrell) came out in March and I hadn’t heard about it until either Gene Steinberg or Paul Kimball asked about it on the Paracast show in May. I said I hadn’t read it but I was bothered by the Nazi aspect. It seemed logical to me that had the Nazis been able to develop something like that the war would have ended differently. And I just don’t see this great secret Nazi network hidden in South America that can control such things... Yes, I know of Odessa and I knew that many of the Nazis fled to South America, but they weren’t developing flying saucers.

First we have to put up with the Air Force and their recapitulation of the weather balloon, now in the guise of Mogul. Then we have to put up with the anthropomorphic dummies dropped a decade later. Then Nick Redfern tells us of deformed Japanese and Unit 731. Next is Jim Carrion at the MUFON Symposium talking about Project Seal and secret weapons. And now we have Nazi UFOs and I’m the bad guy because I hadn’t heard of this book back in May.

Well, now I’ve looked at it and I find it flawed.

"Why?" you ask.

The reliance of the nonsense spouted by Kal Korff, if for no other reason. Korff never heard an anti-Roswell theory he didn’t like and if he had to misinterpret information, it didn’t matter. He said, for example, there were no black (African-American) sergeants at Roswell. He knew because he asked some unidentified Pentagon historian who told him the military was segregated in 1947. Apparently Korff didn’t know that this meant that African-American soldiers were in their own units and at Roswell this was Squadron S. According to the Yearbook produced in 1947 by Walter Haut in Roswell, there were at least 24 black sergeants at the base.

Korff dismisses and then Farrell dismisses (in his Roswell and the Reich) the Beverly Bean testimony for no legitimate reason. Korff complained that we had not been fair in our assessment of the Melvin Brown body story as related by Bean. Farrell quotes Korff, but doesn’t bother to analyze the validity of what Korff had written.

Let’s examine this one bit of nonsense that Farrell finds so important.

Korff in his poorly researched book which Farrell quotes, accuses us, meaning Don Schmitt and me of "journalistic license" and suggests that a more honest way to convey Brown’s testimony would have been to have written, "According to Beverly Bean, Brown’s daughter, he said..."

What Korff objects to is that in describing the Brown information, we had written that Brown had seen the bodies and that he had been involved in escorting two or three of them back to the base. Korff thought this unfair because in our time line of events, and in our description of the events early in the book, we hadn’t mentioned, specifically, that this information came from Bean rather than Brown. But this is an invalid criticism because the footnotes make it clear how the information was obtained. Korff is criticizing me for using a footnote, which is a proper thing to have done and Farrell seems oblivious to this fact, not mentioning it.

On page 96 of UFO Crash at Roswell, we do explain exactly how the information was obtained. The reader knows that the information came from Brown through Bean... and they know who was present at the interview and that it was videotaped... Something that both Korff and Farrell ignore.

On page 82 of The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell, we again mention Brown and write, "Melvin E. Brown, a sergeant with the 509th , told family members that..." Which, of course, means that we have been fair with our treatment of the Brown testimony. Korff should know this because all of this information was published prior to the publication of his book, but he choose to ignore it.

I can say Korff deceives the public by writing in his highly misleading book, "Finally as the pro-UFO Roswell researchers will admit when pressed, Beverly Bean is the only person in the Brown family who has made these claims about her father. Bean’s sister and her own mother have never confirmed the account."

This is, of course, not true and since Korff referenced the 1991 interview conducted with the Brown family, he should have known that both her sister and her mother confirmed the account on video tape. So, Korff rather than writing, "In 1991, both Bean’s sister and mother who had failed to corroborate the story earlier, are now on the record..." Korff chose to conceal this evidence from his readers.

Farrell dismissed the Brown story because of the misinformation published by Korff. Had he bothered to follow through, or had he bothered to ask me, I could have supplied the proper information.

And what makes all this so funny is that Korff, at one point in his book, chastises Don and me for talking about weather casters who were able to identify the rawin target and balloon from the photographs in Ramey’s office. We don’t say who they were, and I’m not sure that it mattered. We were suggesting that anyone could take the pictures to virtually any weather caster and have them attempt to identify the items in the picture. The irony here will become clear later.

Farrell, in his book, again quotes Korff and the Lydia Sleppy story of having her teletype interrupted. Korff knew it was untrue because he checked with the FBI and according to him, they didn’t do it, though Sleppy, in later interviews said they did.

Two questions spring to mind. Why should be believe the FBI on this point? It wasn’t has if they hadn’t been spying on Americans for a long time and it wouldn’t have been difficult for them to tap into the main AP lines at the AP headquarters if they wanted... though I don’t believe this to be the case.

And second, why should we believe Korff on this? He said he checked with the various offices, but provides nothing in the way of documentation for it. He notes in his book, "Kal K. Korff, personal phone conversation with representatives of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington, D.C., and Dallas, Texas, August 1, 1996, through October 15, 1996."

One hell of a bit of documentation. Not a name of who he talked to, not a letter to prove that he had contacted them. Just his bold statement that he had and the FBI denied that they had been running any sort of an operation.

As noted earlier Korff, in his footnotes, also failed to name the Pentagon historian who told him that the military had been segregated in 1947 so no one can check on the validity of his claims. And he had the guts to accuse us of failing to provide names on a point that was more of a side note than an important revelation. Korff, of course, does the opposite by not supplying the names of those who he claims provided him with important information.

Farrell makes another, somewhat similar mistake in discussing the Gerald Anderson story. He wrote that Anderson and I had a falling out sometime during or just after that first interview. But the truth of the matter is, there was no bad blood between us until Stan Friedman interviewed Anderson. During that interview, you hear Friedman tell Anderson not to talk to me, that I’m strange because I write Romances (which is not true... that is, I don’t write Romances but I might be considered strange by some) and that he, Anderson, should only talk to him, Friedman. At that point Anderson would no longer talk to me.

In fact, if you listen to my tape of the interview with Anderson, as noted by John Carpenter in the MUFON Journal (March 1993, No. 299, page 7), you’ll find out that such is not the case. Carpenter wrote, "I finally was able to learn that Gerald had indeed had a friendly 54-minute phone call just as Randle had claimed". So the conclusions drawn by Farrell on this were incorrect and the documentation was out there for him to find.

I always believed that when I’m looking at the writing of someone else I need to make sure that the facts, as presented, are accurate. It took me nearly a year to find the first mention of the Del Rio crash by Robert Willingham so that I could compare it to his later statements. I mean, I want to be sure that the writer actually checked the information for himself and that it is accurate. Farrell apparently didn’t do that.

I only bring all this up because I had been criticized for not reading Farrell’s book even though I hadn’t known of its existence until mentioned on the Paracast. I have read where the research in the book is the best of any that has been done by we UFO investigators, though I wonder how you get around the fact that it seems that Farrell has only reviewed the literature, whether other books, articles or documents. Apparently he did not conduct many personal interviews and did nothing to verify the information in his book.

No, I really shouldn’t be ragging on Farrell this much because it is his fans who have gone off the deep end. My point was that he relied too much on the nonsense spewed by Korff and that he didn’t fact-check what Korff had written.

I think too often that those who haven’t written a book or dealt with a publisher assume that they do fact-checking. Mostly, what publishers do is check to make sure that something won’t get them sued, but the data in a book is not fact-checked. That’s how Korff was able to confuse witness testimony, make claims that weren’t true, and actually have a few people believe what he wrote. Farrell assumed that there was some good there but didn’t check it out.

Yes, I know that Farrell will probably look at this criticism (if he even sees it) and think about it. Korff will launch into another diatribe, threaten lawsuits, threaten more audits of the facts by financial institutions and make up more facts to support himself. He will stamp his foot, insist that we call him "colonel" because of his employment by some mythical organization and continue to slander others. But he won’t offer anything to validate his claims.

Sometimes you just have to risk the wrath of the unwashed to make an important point.

Agreed, the Nazi UFO connection is dotty. And I do not accept Nick Redfern's Roswell solution either. Also agreed, publishers do not check books for accuracy either.

No, Korff will not be suing anyone. These threats are pretty empty I guess, but people often make them to put fear into other writers. Where are those 7 or 8 Roswell books he promised us in 2007? I have never seen or heard of any of them. Do they exist?

Regarding Melvin Brown, neither you nor Korff give the true origins of this Brown testimony. As far as I can tell, it first arose after the publication of Timothy Good's "Above Top Secret" in 1987. Beverly Bean, a Londoner, contacted Tim and told him about her father's involvement at Roswell. Bev had recalled her dad telling his daughters about it soon after he had seen a review of the "Roswell Incident" book c. 1980 in a British tabloid. (Other accounts from Beverly say Brown first related this to them during the Apollo landings, which were about a decade earlier, so take your pick which is correct).Evidently Tim heard this tale from Bev and passed it to Len Stringfield. Where did it go from there? Nowhere do you, or Korff, say how it reached you and/or Don Schmitt. Why cannot you tell us the true path this story took? It has passed through quite a few people's hands, hasn't it? The impression given in your book is that it just 'fell into your lap' from Brown's daughter. It did not.

My own view is that the Brown-Bean story is a shambles and a useless piece of tittle-tattle, but I am not blaming you for this. It is the kind of story that retired soldiers tell to their family when they want to enliven their childrens' lives a bit. Of course it would be beneficial if we could see the original tabloid newspaper that, supposedly, prompted Brown to entertain his daughters in the first place. We don't even know their ages.

Pity Korff could not, or would not, locate this himself or at least give the origins of Brown's tale.

I don't think Korff did any real investigation for his book. He just cobbled together the writings of many others in an attempt to attack the Roswell Story. I don't believe he contacted the FBI about Sleppy... nor do I believe he called the Pentagon to learn the Amry was segragated in 1947. Had he done that, he would have learned what it meant.

I know that I talked to Timothy Good about this sometime in 1989 and showed him the Roswell Yearbook so that he could see Brown's picture in it. I believe Don Schmitt got the actual name of Bean from Stan Friedman, though I could be wrong about that. I know that Don arranged for a video taped interview with Bean, her sister and her mother in March 1990and Jan 1991. I have a copy of the video tape.

Say what you will about the Bean statements but the only real problem with them is that they are second hand. There are all sorts of pitfalls there... but Brown was in Roswell in 1947 which put him ahead of some of those telling tales.

"Nazi UFOs and Roswell"? WTF? You've gotta be kiddin' me. Why even bother with this crap?

Good lord, just that premise alone should be enough to inform those even minimally aware of history that this is a ridiculous canard.

And Kolonel Kal K. Korff? The man has nearly always been an obvious fraud, self-aggrandizer, liar, cynic, CSICOPian monstrosity, and just plain batshit crazy for many, many years now. This is very well known.

I would enjoy his attempting to sue anyone for telling the truth about his sociopathic modus operandi and pathological behavior, false claims, and absurd, hilarious "investigatory" actions over the past 10 to 15 years, at least. He's not even worthy of being laughed at--he's plainly just sick in the head. He is only to be remotely pitied.

"The horror. The horror!" --Kurtz in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"

Forget him. And if Farrell wrote a book based largely on Korff's unvetted, unattributed second and third-hand assertions and wild blatherings, then he too is kind of a blinded idiot.

These guys, just like Billy Mumy's malign character in an infamous episode of the Twilight Zone did to anyone who bothered him (playing Anthony Fremont, a six-year old monster and mutant with godlike mental powers in "It's A Good Life"--see: http://bit.ly/6K5aZ), deserve to be "wished away into the cornfield," only in deference to the Roswell case, they should instead be wished away into the "debris field," and forever disappear into their own self-created and odious sulphuric ozone.

These clowns just cannot be taken seriously by anyone serious. Korff is a thief, confabulator of extraordinary degree, and just plain "bad man, a very bad man" as even little Anthony, age six, could tell you just before he wished them away, but not before turning them into living jack-in-the-boxes, with spring-loaded bobbly heads loosely a'jouncin' around, babblin' bovine offal to the gullible "unwashed."

Hmmmm. That imagery may be more real-life than many might think, metaphorically speaking. 8^}

I have been leery of Farrell since I read an online transcript of an interview in which he stated that he was not really concerned with whether or not the various (supposed) Nazi sources/documents he based his research on were 'genuine'; he was much more concerned with whether or not the documents were 'internally consistent with one another'. As a person who works in a library and helps people to find usable, reliable sources for various research papers, etc., I can tell you that documents can be internally consistent from here to next week, but if they are proven to be fake, all the internal consistency (between fakes) means nothing.

It was a funny sort of throw-away remark that was made as a non-answer to a question about where he got his source material from, and the interviewer actually let his non-answer stand, even though what Farrell had basically said was that he was not concerned with whether or not his sources were in fact genuine. I remember that at the time I read the interview, it blew me away that he'd actually admitted openly that he really hadn't vetted anything he was using, which makes his work useless from a scholarly point of view.

Since that interview, I have simply ignored his writings as entirely conjectural, as I suspect that a goodly amount of his 'source material' is bogus.

Yes, I'll try to see if I can find it. It was an older interview (I'm guessing about a year and a half back), and I know it was not the Project Camelot interview transcript-- I had a quick look at that today while I was at work, and there is really no discussion at all in that interview about verification of sources, yea or nay (another interviewer oversight, I think).

The oldest things I've been able to find on a search are interviews he gave to Rumor Mill News, The Byte Show, and Red Ice Creations Radio, but all that's left are the archived MP3s of the shows. I also know he was on C2C, but as I said, I seem to remember it was an interview transcript that I read. I even remember that I talked to someone at work about it after the fact, as legit primary sources are so important to people writing papers, etc. Anyway, I will keep digging, and I'll listen to some of the archived stuff and see if I can find it there.

"Sometimes you just have to risk the wrath of the unwashed to make an important point."

Forgetting for a moment that Carrion and Korff —which on reflection sounds like a firm of facile litigators— abundantly display no "there" there, "unwashed" is one thing, "soiled" and "deliberately soiling" is another thing altogether.

Who quotes "Korff" on anything? I suspect the lovely Mr. Carrion will soon discover an inauspicious liability for doing so.

The only flaw I see here is lumping my research in the same bucket as Korff's and Redfern's research.

Take the time of a responsible researcher and review the video presentation titled "Russian Espionage and UFOs" at http://www.centerforufotruth.org before make another irresponsible assertion about my research.

The whole Nazi "flying disk" myth is very important to understanding the psycho-social aspects of the phenomenon.

Whether by human design or engineered by a nonhuman intelligence, this phenomenon seems to have a pattern for social acculturation - "cultural tracking."

It doesn't matter if the Nazi regime had actual flying disks. What matters is how this myth is disseminated to society.

For example, Kenneth Arnold never saw objects shaped like "flying saucers," but the initial report did imply such an object.

Also, when you look at the abduction phenomenon you see exactly the same response from the public. The typical "grays" were not reported very much, if at all, prior to the sixties. But, during the eighties several popular books and movies came out describing these entities. A study by Ballester Olmos reveals a very definite pattern with the images presented in popular culture with the reports of abductions and the types of entities reported.